1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a commodity antitheft implement for preventing pilferage of commodities for rent such as disks, videotapes or game software recorded with music or images of CD cassettes, or pilferage of various commodities for sale that are accumulated in cases, for preventing these commodities including their cases from being taken outside of the store without permission, and for preventing theft of various commodities for sale stored in such cases.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There exists a problem in, for instance, rental stores that pilferage and theft of commodities for rent cannot be prevented when displaying cases in which the commodities for rent are being actually stored on shelves of the stores since conventional cases are not provided with means for preventing opening thereof.
Thus, a method is used in which empty cases are arranged and displayed on the shelves of the rental store. When a customer takes a displayed empty case of a commodity for rent bearing a title of his or her wish off of the shelf and brings it to the counter, a salesperson standing by the counter will take the corresponding commodity for rent (as indicated on the empty case) out of a storage place. Upon completion of specified lending procedures, the customer may rent the commodity.
Employing such a method prevents theft of commodities for rent since the customer will not directly touch the actual commodity for rent until lending procedures are completed. However, it is troublesome for the salesperson to select commodities for rent from the storage place or to maintain these commodities in a tidy manner. Thus, such a method is disadvantageous in that it is difficult to smoothly perform lending procedures and in that a wide storage place is required.
On the other hand, it would be possible to solve such a problem by displaying cases storing therein commodities for rent on shelves of the rental store, and performing lending procedures when a customer takes a commodity for rent of his or her wish out of one of the cases and brings it to the counter. However, theft cannot be prevented since the customer may directly touch the commodities for rent and take them out of the store without permission.
Some rental stores are now preventing theft of commodities for rent by attaching antitheft tags with particular ID codes to arbitrary positions of the commodities for rent. A predetermined high frequency electromagnetic field is then generated in a gateway of the store, and when one tries to take a commodity for rent out without permission and passes through the gateway, such an unauthorized pass of the commodity for rent may be detected upon resonance of a resonance circuit of the ID code to generate a particular ID code, and detection thereof upon demodulation through the high frequency electromagnetic field that the salesperson may observe. Such a method is, however, disadvantageous in that commodities for rent of which predetermined lending procedures have been completed will be detected similar to those taken out without permission unless such ID codes of the antitheft tags are shielded in some way when performing lending processes at the counter. Thus, this method results in a drawback of troublesome shielding procedures and a remarkable increase in costs due to equipment accompanying the shielding.
Problems are not limited to the above-described cases with commodities for rent, but will also arise when employing antitheft tags for preventing theft of various commodities for sale such as clothing, accessories or daily necessities.
Theft of commodities that are stored in cases comprised, for instance, of a box body and a cover body for opening and closing an aperture of the box body frequently occurs since it is easy to conduct pilferage of the commodities due to the openable arrangement. Even if cases provided with opening-preventing key members or sliders are employed, it is still possible to open the cases since corresponding portions that are latched with the key members or sliders could be broken or released by applying force in a direction for opening the case.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a commodity antitheft implement capable of preventing the opening of the cases for eliminating pilferage of commodities for rent or of objects of which theft shall be prevented, and capable of eliminating the necessity of providing shields by leaving tags for preventing unauthorized removal of commodities within the store, wherein cases may not be opened even upon application of force in a direction for opening the cases.